Highly competitive qualifying ends with Omani 12th fastest in LMGT3

Muscat; Fuji Speedway in Japan delivered a very close qualifying session today, Saturday, 14th September, ahead of the penultimate race of the FIA World Endurance Championships season – Oman’s Ahmad Al Harthy concluding the run 12th fastest.

Taking a sixth row start for tomorrow’s 6 Hours of Fuji, the Team WRT squad opted to utilise two sets of tyres during the session in order to maximise the performance available to them – Fuji not the most favourable of circuits for the BMW M4 LMGT3.

Following the mid-session pit-stop, Al Harthy emerged to produce his quickest lap as the clock counted down but unfortunately missed out on the cut-off for progression into the top 10 Hyperpole shoot-off by little more than two tenths of a second.

Preparations for the race weekend with team-mates Maxime Martin and Valentino Rossi got underway on Friday, 13h September, with two free practice sessions and after a further practice period today Al Harthy headed into qualifying.

The OQ, Oman Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth, Omantel, Experience Oman and BMW Oman supported driver was among the first to join the track as soon as the green light came on for the 12-minute session to begin. Setting a time of 1m44.981 seconds on his first lap as he started to build up speed and tyre temperature, on his first true flyer the Omani improved to 1m42.141 seconds.

With five minutes of the short-sharp session to run, the Team WRT driver was on the bubble of the top 10 cut-off for progression into Hyperpole with just a couple of tenths of a second making the difference. He then made a swift pit-stop to fit a fresh set of Goodyear tyres and re-emerged with just enough time for two more laps.

Sitting 16th on the times and with the pressure building, Ahmad climbed back into the top 12 with his best lap of the session – 1m41.866 seconds. With just over 0.2 seconds to find to break into Hyperpole, a further improvement wasn’t possible and so he concluded qualifying in 12th position.

Ahmad Al Harthy:

“Qualifying was the best we could do, Fuji is one of the toughest tracks for us. In terms of our strategy, we always we decided we wanted to do two flyers with two sets of tyres.Our strategy did work for us, and we’re happy with that decision as we moved up to P12 in the end. We know we can have a better race than qualifying, so hopefully we can do that.

“It’s going to be a long six hour race, and there will be tyre degradation, so it’s going to be interesting for us. There are a lot of positives we’ve taken from quali, it’s the fastest I’ve been all weekend – so that’s a good sign. We know our competitors have an edge here, for many different reasons, so our job is to reduce that and climb as many places as we can in the race.”

Round seven of the FIA WEC season, the 6 Hours of Fuji, is scheduled to begin at 11.00 local time tomorrow, Sunday, 15th September. Follow everything live at www.fiawec.com